You Can Stop Fighting With Your Chidren!

Here is the bestselling book that will give you the know–how you need to be more effective with your children and more supportive of yourself. Enthusiastically praised by parents and professionals around the world, the down–to–earth, respectful approach of Faber and Mazlish makes relationships with children of all ages less stressful and more rewarding.

Their methods of communication, illustrated with delightful cartoons showing the skills in action, offer innovative ways to solve common problems.

This book is in its twentieth edition for a reason: these methods WORK. I personally know a mother who formerly used the harsh, punitive methods of James Dobson, only to find that her problems with her daughter became worse and worse over time rather than better. After she read "How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk" and put its suggestions into practice, she literally threw Dobson's volume into the trash. And after a year and a half, she told me her relationship with her daughter had improved so much that she'd previously had no idea that it COULD be that good. The fact that the problems she'd been having had vanished now seemed almost an afterthough compared to the deepening of their parent-child bond. Their communication had improved profoundly, opening up previously unguessed levels of richness in their relationship. "She is such a terrific kid," my friend once told me, and with genuine incredulity added, "I can't believe I actually used to HIT her!!"

Another acquaintance of mine, who is raising two great kids using nonpunitive methods of the sort Faber and Mazlish recommend, summarized her entire philosophy in just one sentence: "I don't want obedient children, I want COOPERATIVE children!" I think the great majority of parents, if they thought about it, would realize that this is what they too would prefer. Faber and Mazlish show the way.

This book appears at first glance to be a collection of nonpunitive discipline techniques, but it is actually much more: a whole new way of thinking about the parent-child relationship which transcends the permissiveness vs strictness continuum with an approach to parenting based on neither punishments nor rewards. Authoritarian methods use coercion to make the child lose and the parent win, while total permissiveness makes the parent lose and the child win. Faber and Mazlish's methods, on the other hand, show the way towards families in which everybody wins.

Christopher Dugan

http://www.geocities.com/cddugan/homepage.html

61 of 61 found the following review helpful:


My four children and I are much happier now!  Feb 01, 2006 By Kimberly White "budget shopper"
My husband bought this book when our oldest child was 10. We realized we weren't communicating well and were frightened that we would lose our relationship altogether when she hit her teenage years. Well, the book was a godsend. The authors basically teach you how to treat your child like a capable and worthy person, when you may be treating them as irresponsible, unimportant, or unlikeable. They first convince you to stop criticizing your children for what they think or feel, and to acknowledge how they might be feeling when they tell things to you. I know this sounds touchy-feely, but acknowledging feelings doesn't mean giving your kids any leeway in their behavior. For example, instead of saying "You shouldn't be mad at your brother, he's only three!" you say "I can see that it makes you angry when he messes up your things. But yelling is not allowed in our house." or, "He's too young to understand how special those are to you, so how can we keep your things safe?" You let your child know you are paying attention to how they feel, BEFORE you focus on solving the problem.

The second thing they emphasize is to make correcting behavior about the behavior, and not about the child. Instead of "Get your homework! You always forget things!" you just say, "Homework needs to go to school with you."

One thing we had a problem with at first is that the authors do not support time-outs. We had always been big believers in consequences for behavior, and had relatively well-behaved children with the time-out method. Well, we gave it a try, and were amazed. We found that we were fully able to correct our children's behaviors without time-out at all. And in fact, they were happier and less disobedient in general when they weren't constantly being sent away from the family in disgrace. We haven't even been tempted to put anyone in time-out for almost a year. Most surprising, our 3-year-old COMPLETELY stopped throwing tantrums within about two days of our stopping time-outs. It was a dramatic change for a child who had always been a little difficult to handle.

Our oldest was slower to respond (age has a lot to do with it, I think) and we found it much harder to implement changes for her. It was difficult to stop lecturing and blaming her. But we have, and we have a fantastic relationship! Other parents of kids the same age are surprised how well we communicate and how fun and friendly our relationship is. We still have the teen years to get through, but I'm much more confident they will be a success, as we know how to treat her like a capable, loveable, valuable person.

Buy this book. End of story.

214 of 236 found the following review helpful:


Good book, but not as thorough as should be  May 22, 2001 By Joe Wilmot
I just read this book and -- though it it's right on the money in its attitude towards childrearing -- it doesn't describe the mechanics of how the "listening" and "talking" skills work as well as Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.). P.E.T. has a chapter called How to Listen so Children Will Talk and another called How to Talk so Children Will Listen. I wonder how the autors of this book got away with borrowing the title for their book straight out of some chapters in another (the original P.E.T. was published years before -- the one at stores now is a new edition).

Lest it sound like I'm slamming this book, truth is it's not a bad read at all. But for an in-depth explanation of how these skills can be put to daily use, I'd go for P.E.T. Better yet, read both.

Even better yet, first read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman to get an idea WHY these skills are so important to a child's development, then follow it up with P.E.T. and this book.

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